


Womb of Rome

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alien Biology, Alien Gender/Sexuality, Alternate Universe, Ancestors, Background Relationships, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Bulges and Nooks, Canon Related, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, Egg Laying, End of the World, F/M, Forced Pregnancy, Hemospectrum, Oviposition, Power Imbalance, References to Canon, Reproductive Coercion, Sexual Coercion, Sexual Violence, The Vast Glub, Xeno, and more - Freeform, heirarchy, lie back and think of the Empire, misplaced loyalties, traumatic insemination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 21:12:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15938387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: The Vast Glub happens, Dualscar survives.So does Her Imperious Condescension.





	Womb of Rome

When Dualscar regained consciousness, he was floating through an asteroid belt in a ship of the dead. 

There had been no sign that anything was abnormal on this routine security sweep in a mostly peaceful quadrant of Alternian space, that this was the night that they would all die, right up until the screaming started. It had begun at the bottom of the hemospectrum and then worked its way upwards, rust being followed by dirt, their helmsman at mustard shorting out electrical support systems and bringing their propulsion to an end, and continued up. Up. Through the blue and green midbloods, and then. Even his violet blood officers, only slightly more purple-blue in blood than his own colour had clutched at their ears, blood streaming from their mouths, their noses, their eyes. Collapsed.

The screaming keen rattling through his thinkpan had gotten worse and worse and he’d screamed along with it the way every other troll once alive on his cruiser had up until their heads exploded under the invasive sound. He’d beaten his head against a wall until the swelling pressure of the Vast Glub of the Emissary pressing against the inner walls of his skull led him into darkness. The pain had been so intense that he’d welcomed the end, eager to let it finish him when he'd beaten every other challenge that life had thrown at him.

His first thought was that he had died. The second was that no, he was alive but he only knew it because the world was proving to him once again, that existence was pain. Levering himself up onto his elbows, he made himself crawl from where he was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood and bile to the commsrig, to see if he could receive anything. Send something. The backup systems had kicked in, there were lights waiting for him, heat, oxygen, and with one ashen-knuckled grip on the edge of the console, he dragged himself to his feet through pure force of will.

It had been a long time since he worked the communication consoles by himself, but there was no one else still alive to do anything. He was alone. Wiping the blood away from underneath his nose and ignoring the fact that his chin, his uniform, was covered in it as well, he opened the emergency channel and started to beam a distress call into the emptiness of space, setting the intercom system to alert him if anyone responded before getting to the wearisome task of doing something about the ship and all of its dead. If he did nothing and just left the bodies to rot, he would be sick and dying and then joining them in no short order. There were immense sections of the ship that he closed off, where he shut down every system he could to preserve the energy for life support in the area he planned to endeavour to keep warm and oxygenated for his own use and drained the air back into reservoirs. The bodies should mummify and dry out; good enough to keep disease from him, he thought.

But he did need to live somewhere so that wasn't a solution he could apply to the whole ship. He gave his fellow seatrolls the fullest honours he could manage under the circumstances once he gathered up their bodies, said words that it felt like he had last uttered on the oceans of the world where he'd been born over other dead bodies, other dead comrades, before leaving the small airlock and closing it behind him. Dualscar did not watch as the corpses were jettisoned into space, to endless quiet. The bodies of the lowblood crew were not as important and he took less care with them, discarding them to space with no effort and no words to accompany them into the void. When he was finished with that task, he retired for the day, ate a small amount of grubloaf and collapsed into his recuperacoon. The cruiser might have been outfitted for hundreds of trolls but who could know when he would get a chance to resupply or with what – and seatrolls could live for a very long time. He had no desire to spend time starving to death alone in the middle of a galaxy devoid of Alternian life.

Early in the next evening, he visited the helmsblock.

The whole room was painted in honey blood and the tentacles of biowire seemed to flex, even though he knew it had no mind to direct them; the helmstroll was dead, thin face fixed in a silent scream for eternity and coated with its own pissblood running out from under the visor over its eyes and down its chin from the slack mouth. Shifting his grip on the handle of the axe he picked up in the armoury, he eyed the biowires holding the emaciated figure of the psionic troll in their limp embrace and decided on the best places to start chopping. The steel edge of the blade sheared cleanly through tyrian purple tentacles and he caught the husk of his former helmsman easily, hoisting the decrepit thing over his shoulder. He dragged the body out and chopped it into smaller, more manageable pieces before shoving it down an oblivicinerator shaft to be burned into ash. His hands and forearms were coated in yellow blood.

It took some scrubbing to get it out from under his claws later in the ablutionsblock. It seemed to want to stay and cling. Tenacious, as its previous owner hadn't been.

If what had happened here had happened everywhere, there was no replacement for this piece of biohardware. Back to the emergency backup nuclear system for the foreseeable future - which was going to make travel out of this sun system and to somewhere hopefully civilised and inhabited painfully slow. And the whole time – alone.

He was swabbing up puddles of congealed blood and vomit from the control deck when the intercom chimed. Dualscar froze, and then dropped the cleaning stick to go and answer the incoming call. Who else could be alive? While he’d never minded having his own company before, there was a significant difference between choosing to be by himself and being forced to be alone because there is no one else. Only ghosts. Only corpses. And he was no lowblood to have any sort of psionic capability, let alone necropathy.

“Sometroll acshoally there?” a peeved growl came through as he flipped switches, and looked up to be greeted by the sight of a relic of a troll wearing the sign of Her Imperious Condescension in royal fuchsia on her black bodysuit and the Imperial Crown. She was a monster; all needle teeth and glaring eyes, her tyrian-tined fins fluttering at the sides of her face. She was glorious, amazing. He bowed to hide the expression on his face, putting his fist over where his pusher lay in his thoracic cavern. Her lips were pursed; she did not appear to very impressed with his survival. “Whale. What’s yoar name, fish?”

“Dualscar, your Imperious Condescension.” 

“Dualscar, is it. Hooks pike you’re it, guppy. Just you ‘n me.”

“Your Imperious Majesty?”

“That wrasse the Vast Glub, morayon. Gl'bgolyb lost her fuckin’ ship and pier we oar.” She looked off to one side of the viewer screen, and Dualscar found himself staring unguarded for a moment while her gaze was directed away from his face. That was definitely a spasm of pity inside his chest. She had looked so lost, just for a moment. How could a troll that old, _that_ powerful look...lost? “Netting back to baysness, wave are you at?”

“We were performing a security sweep in the Nagdek quadrant,” he told her, and she grimaced at his answer, obviously displeased at how far he was, from wherever she was currently residing. She made a sweeping motion with her beringed hand and the screen lit up with starmaps, replacing her face.

“Rayght. Means we’re a bit far from trench otter, but we can meet up here.” There were two cursors on the screen, and they were lightyears from each other. Two lines, one tyrian and one violet-purple snaked their way through star systems until they met at an unimportant outpost. Dualscar knew the maps well enough that he realised that it was not quite the straightest route to each other – but it was the straightest route that kept both of them moving towards Alternia. “You can handle that ship you got there?”

“I can pilot a ship adequately enough for this, your Imperious Majesty. Even on nuclear power alone.”

“Later, fins. Get your bass movin’, this is a whole bunch of ship I don’t wanna deel wave for too long.”

And that was it, she was gone without a single word of courtesy. Dualscar hesitated with his hands over the controls, then slowly keyed in the course co-ordinates that she had sent him. Just as he had been ordered to do. It was probably a little much to expect her to stay around and talk, but, again, he was lonely. And alone, without even corpses for company in his little part of the ship that he'd kept live. 

He supposed that when a troll was the Empress, lonely was something one would become accustomed to, and of course, she had no need to concern herself with _his_ feelings. But if you were Empress, what else could you be beside alone, sitting on the Imperial throne? There would be no one to speak to, not any equal. He may have been higher than anyone else on the ship, higher than almost anyone except Her Imperious Condescension herself, but. He’d had quadrants. He’d been pitied. He’d been hated. When had she ever been, in any satisfying way?

It sparked a sort of pity in him that he vowed he would never make known. How could he? She was the Empress. She was far beyond him. Even if they were the only two trolls left in the universe. No. That couldn’t be true. He refused to believe it was; there had been so many of their species. All thriving, all striving and fighting, all of them working for the glory of Alternia. How could it be only the two of them left, one old Orphaner and his Empress?

When their ships met, she insisted that he move what supplies he could into her holds and then they would leave. Her ship was faster and she was racing for the heart of her Empire, Alternia. There would be colonised planets all through the three galaxies they had invaded currently relearning bad habits of freedom from Alternian rule, and she would not have that. It was not his place to argue but to obey, so Dualscar did exactly as he was bid. If nothing else, he had always known his duty. Worked his guts out to move food, sopor slime and oxygen concentrate into her hull and murmured not a word of complaint. Who else would do it but him, after all? She was the Empress, and there was no one else left, no lowbloods to take over menial tasks. He did what was required - _he did his duty_.

In the ship, she moved like a ghost. If he had not known better, he would have thought he was alone. There were corridors, empty and echoing, but not a trace of any other troll ever having lived there before he arrived except for. The Helmsblock. He found it once, and then moved on immediately. If she chose to keep the decaying body of her Helmsman in his block, he would not raise the issue. It was obvious that she still spent time in there, by the tracks in the golden blood, around and around the column and smashed viewers which still spat sparks and garbled fragments of code. Was it grief? Or merely rage? Dualscar would never enquire, it was not his place. He was her officer, her subordinate, not her moirail or even some sort of friendly acquaintance. 

They were almost all the way to Alternia when she actually started to talk to him after what was surely sweeps of silence. He made sure his answers were respectful, polite and she continued to loosen up until he dared to try a little wit as well. As if they could perhaps not be entirely enemies with each other. It was the end of the world, after all. There was very little reason to fight over resources at all anymore, but the most he hoped for was to be able to make her laugh, forget for a moment perhaps that it really was the end of their world. Her laughter was hoarse and rough as though she didn't get a chance to practice it, and he enjoyed it every time he heard it. It was presumptuous, beyond presumptuous, to think he could pity the Empress, but somehow. He did. He was an ageing campaigner, an old Orphaner who had been semi-retired to an exploratory and peacekeeping vessel, not even a battle cruiser of war - but - her only remaining subject, as far as they knew. There had been no other signals whatsoever, not from Alternia, from any colony planet, or from another ship. It was just the two of them, alone, together. Possibly until one of them died, and then the other would be completely alone, in a universe empty of trolls.

When they arrived at Alternia, it was to a scene of complete devastation.

Nothing. There was...nothing. The planet was barely even showing signs of vegetation, a wisp of atmosphere. Despite that there was no hope left at all, he hung back behind her shoulder as the Empress directed the ship to sweep the planet for any signs of trolls, any sign that someone, something, had survived. The meteor craters across the surface were a blasphemy. The oceans looked to be obliterated, boiled away, the whole planet was just a pockmarked ruin. The brooding caverns...the brooding caverns were gone, the Mother Grub was probably a mist of particles, and he couldn't have stopped the wounded sound he made even if he'd known he was going to make it, when they saw that particularly deep hole in the ground. Nothing left. Nothing at all. 

When he looked at her, he didn't see devastation like what he felt inside him, some yawning dark pit of despair that threatened to swallow him whole. Her lips were peeled back from her needle teeth in a snarl, furious rage the only emotion she had to show. With a screech of pure fury that rattled his ears and scraped down his backbone in a way that made him flinch away from another troll like he hadn't since his first adult moult, she whirled away from the viewscreens and stalked out of the room. If there had been a door she could have slammed, he was sure she would have slammed it to punctuate her departure and mark it with a sound of her displeasure.

He didn't see her for a cycle at least, and they simply sat in orbit around their dead homeworld while he waited for her to make her decisions about what they would do. A ghost in the ship, that's all Dualscar felt he was. Was there any point in continuing this farce? Their species was finished, any dream of universal Empire under the hand of Her Imperious Condescension lay in ruins. Perhaps it would be better simply to accept the circumstances as they were, and simply join every other troll in death. 

He should have known that the Empress would never accept defeat.

It wasn't in her nature.

"You want me to what." Her lip curled in a sneer at his answer as his fins flared out in sheer shock, unable to keep himself from the instinctive reaction, the impulsive question without a hint of deference. Apparently, without a Mother Grub, she was planning on him taking the place of that behemoth. How could he be expected to do that? How? Surely, it was impossible. It would never, never work. Grubs? Eggs? From him? No, no...this was some form of nightmare.

"Grubs, buoy. How else you think we gonna net them, if we ain't doing this ship for ourshellves? And bereef me, I ain't gonna be the one playing grubcage." He almost reared back as her hand came up to the streak in his hair, the one that had been growing out in a soft violet in his black hair since he had not been bothered to keep covering it up. If she was going to cull him over it, then, at least, this would be over. It was an aberration, and she curled her fingers in it as he stared at her, feeling his eyes go wide and torn-edged fins flared out to their extremes in a useless threat display he was not even sure he meant. He was taller than her, broader, but her monster grin stretched wide at him and he felt an atavistic fear deep in his guts as she pulled his face closer to hers. "That gonna be all _you_ , betta you don't ebben minnow wharf this lil streak means."

"I admit, I do not, Imperious Majesty." Somehow, his voice was steady as she curled her fingers round and through his violet streak, the colour lighter now than it had been in his youth. Faded. He'd used to have to work so hard to keep it covered, to hide it. It was only a cosmetic mutation, at least so he'd thought, but it could have been the sign of more mutations, cullable ones...and apparently it was the sign of more, but a mutation that pleased the Empress rather than angered her, now. In this situation that they were in at present, the only two trolls left alive and no Mother Grub, no drones. There was only the two of them, alone.

"Means you got breeder gear tucked away in yoar belly," she purred at him, and her voice was vicious and gloating and the faint pulse of pity he had felt for her briefly disappeared entirely. All he felt now was a crawling fear, as she touched him with greedy hands. One hand was on the side of his face now, while the other kept playing with his bloodstreak. He wanted to drag his gaze away from hers, and he couldn't find the strength to do it, trapped like some small squeakbeast in front of a venomous wrigglefiend. Drowning in the fuchsia of her big, staring eyes, the gleaming brightness of her smile. "Shoald have been culled when you wharu wriggler, I didn't pike the idea of unauthorised breeding. You got lucky. Didn't net caught, didn't get knocked up." A laugh, grating and harsh which made him feel doom right down to his bones. Nothing like the laughter he'd managed to prompt in her before, there was no softness or fondness in it whatsoever. " _I_ got lucky, becrayse _now I glubbin **need** you_ , ain't that a joke to make a Subjuggulator slap a thigh over." She paused, tongue passing over her fangs restlessly. "If any of 'em were around to slap one, I mean."

"Imperious Majesty."

"Don't hook so frayghtened, buoy. It...whaaale, I won't say it won't hurt, becrayse it gonna." Her hand pressed against his stomach, and he had never in his life felt less aroused. "But you'll live." That was not a promise that Dualscar found satisfying. Or reassuring. She grinned and slapped him on the shoulder, and his chin tucked down against his neck defensively, hiding his throat as her fangs gleamed. "Whelk, no tide like the present. Get yoarshellf cleaned up and meet me at my quarters. Who knows, everyfin might be dried up in you, Dualscar, manta not even be any rayson to try. But until I minnow for shore...we gonna sea what we can sea." Her hand touched his belly again, and he managed to control his flinch as she patted him once, twice, fingers spread greedily as though she could reach within his body to touch his insides and ascertain for herself whether there was anything in there worth pulling out.

Amazing, how once he'd admired her, he'd done such things for her. For the Empire. He'd barely managed to live through what had wound up being one of her acts of black flirtation with the Grand Highblood when she sent him to the beast with scroll in hand wreathed in fuchsia coloured insults that he had found out about only after the Subjuggulator had read it, somehow coming out with a joke when it was demanded of him that the monstrous beast found amusing enough for him to keep his head where it was, intact and on his shoulders. He'd orphaned countless adolescent trolls, feeding their lusii to the Great Carbuncle as was his duty, and he'd never cared, he'd counted it an honour but here he was. Now. After centuries of life doing exactly what her orders had told him to do, he supposed there was no reason to change. Even if these orders made him...wildly uncomfortable. 

"As my Empress commands." 

His heels clicked together as he bowed, and she laughed again in that dry rasping way. Like this was amusing to her in a way that he would never understand and before this horrifying conversation he would have done almost anything to have something he said make her laugh, and now it just made his skin crawl. Backing away from her, less like a courtier leaving the room and more like something small and vulnerable keeping its eyes on a predator as it backed away to something like safety, he left her there. Turning away from him as she went to sit in her throne, one leg crossed over the other and foot kicking as she almost pouted. Haloed by the mass of long hair that surrounded her as she obviously descended into contemplation that didn't require his company.

So he went to cleanse himself.

As he had been ordered to. He washed every part of him, he took such care over it that he strung it out long past what was reasonable. It wasn't as though the Empress had acted as though she was in a hurry. Cleaned from horn to clawtip and in a new uniform from the wardobifier, he left his room and went to hers, carefully not thinking of what was coming. It was the only way he could keep foot moving in front of each other, again and again and again. Until he was there, hesitating, hand lifted to knock on the portal to her quarters. Where he'd never been. Had wanted to be invited inside, once. There had been a time, long ago, when he was young and foolish and still sailed a ship that flew on waves of ocean spray as opposed to aetheric currents of interstellar space, when he had imagined himself flushed for the Empress. It had been a wriggler's fantasy. Confronted with the actual reality of the Empress, the Empire, it had long since dissolved into dust.

"Took your tide." She looked him over once she opened the door, sniffed, and then stood aside to let him in. It felt more like walking to his execution than anything else ever had before. Even when he'd gone to that hulking, brightly painted fortress that sprawled halfway between desert and coast, imperial missive in hand, he hadn't felt like this. He hadn't known what he'd carried, of course, but. He'd found out. And even that, standing in front of the Grand Highblood as he demanded tribute, apology, _one motherfucking joke, you finfaced **motherfucker** , TRY ME_, he'd never felt as afraid then as he did now, walking to her concupiscent platform.

Her colour was everywhere.

As was the gold.

Stiffly, he stood by the bed and let the Empress look him over, again. Now he was in her block, her space, on her territory. A violet mote in the midst of her opulent decor. He felt crawlingly uneasy, like he had scittercrawlers moving over his skin. Maybe under it. Tiny and prickling, making him want to bathe again until the feeling went away. 

"Strip." What else could he do? Dualscar undid the top seal of his uniform, and started to remove his clothes. She lounged back onto her platform, and sipped from a glass of wine as he disrobed himself at her orders, like a slave. Some part of his pride sparked at that, when he'd daydreamed about a moment like this as an adolescent cadet, deeply infatuated with her aura and her legend, he'd thought of it as - well, not a meeting of equals, but there had been some respect from her to him. Some kind of care. Not this terrible encompassing boredom that he can see in her eyes, as though anyone would have done and maybe even been better. But he was what she had. It was worse than anything he could have ever thought of.

Naked in front of her, he stood there and managed to keep his hands by his sides, let her look her fill. She was his Empress; no matter what, no matter anything else, _she was his Empress_. He would do as he was commanded. When she pressed him back onto the bed underneath her, climbing up on top of him and forcing his legs apart, she doesn't kiss him. She didn't say a word to him. She bit his neck, her hands travelled down the length of his body but when he tried to do the same for her, she slapped his hands away.

"Just stay still, cod damn. Wharf the fuck do you think this is, some kinda flush fling?" she sneered, and ran her hands over her own body instead. Long fingers touching her gill-slits, along her torso. Stroking herself between her legs, until her bulge slimed its way out of her sheath. Vibrantly, deeply fuchsia, and very large. Arousing herself, but doing it in a way that made it obvious that this was a chore, something she just had to get past for the Good of the Empire. Not because what she was doing was something she _wanted_ to do, but because it would _get_ her something she wanted.

"Vwhat the fuck is that?" Dualscar said in horror as her bulge wasn't the only thing that emerged from the juncture of her thighs. Some sort of dark, club-like thing slid out underneath, looking like part of her hardened carapace. It was still all in the same region, so he had to assume it was some kind of reproductive organ. But he'd never - he'd never seen any troll with something like that before and he tried to squirm backwards, feeling a throb of repulsed fear run down his backbone. 

"S'just my spike." Despite his obvious reluctance, the way he moved back, the Condesce did not stop. She moved forward, with the blunt prod of the 'spike' as she called it, rubbing against his nook. He could feel his body almost making ready to receive it and Dualscar made a motion to open his mouth again, hand lifting off the sheets where he'd been clutching at them. Almost raising it to push her off him, forgetting himself that much, but she didn't wait for him to complete the gesture. 

The spike, as she called it, stabbed forward into his nook and Dualscar let out a horrified wheeze at the feel of it piercing him. Deep inside. Her hair moved over her shoulders in ways that reminded him of her lusus, of seaweed in the deep and a depth that couldn't be swum safely. He hasn't cried in a hundred, hundred sweeps but the feeling of the deep thick thing inside him, _stabbing_ deeply into vulnerable soft parts, made tears come to his eyes. Horrified, utterly repulsed by her, by what she was doing, as he tried to shove her off. 

It's nothing like any pailing he'd gone through before. Even with Mindfang, vicious and bitter-tinged with hate as their couplings had been, it hadn't been like this. The spike stabbed, through his seedflap, _inside_ in a terrible violating way, nothing like a bulge, nothing like anything natural. Like she'd taken a part of her body, made it into a weapon and was wreaking on him something that more punishment than anything else. The waves of jabbing agony as she moved back and forth above him, still somehow looking _bored_. Dualscar gritted his fangs as she slammed his wrists to the platform to stop him weakly pushing at her and throwing off her rhythm, and then rolled her eyes, like she couldn't think of anything more tedious than what she was doing right now. It felt like she was ripping him apart inside and it took forever until she was finally finished.

He gagged as he felt something more solid then slurry, odd, bulbous, being pushed through the spike into what he was sure were his ruptured insides. Settling into place inside him, cold and final, as the Empress froze above him with the look of boredom finally lifting to a sort of focused concentration. Her richly tinged fuchsia gills fluttering, earfins flared in dominant aggression, fangs bared in a rictus of a grin. He panted raggedly, feeling dampness on his cheeks and his earfins switched so hard back they ached, not wanting to look down. Whatever she was putting inside him, he could feel them shifting, finding new places to settle, stretching out parts of him he hadn't known he had.

The rest of it was almost an anticlimax, her bulge replacing the spike once it had withdrawn, feeling like it had taken his insides with it as it pulled slowly from his violated nook. Cold slurry being pumped inside, on top of and around the - he doesn't even want to think the word. Her hand worked him into an unsatisfying climax, violet spilling on top of tyrian and he shuddered with distaste, gills and fins flared with disgusted arousal. She treated the whole thing like a job she had to do, mildly arduous, irritating but needful. 

When she rolled off him with something of a satisfied sound, Dualscar eeled away from her in the bed, holding his hand to his stomach and trying not to vomit all over her expensive sheets. Not that they weren't a ruin anyway, covered in violet and tyrian. Blood and slurry, in two royal shades on top of the platform, all between his thighs. What a fuckin' picture. Just fuckin' perfect. He was trying not to breathe, not to think - fuming about the mess on the sheets was easier than thinking about what was pressing at the inside of his belly, making skin bulge. 

"If that don't take, we'll just have t'try again," she murmured, and stretched her arms above her head languorously. Finally showing something besides boredom and apathy. "Now get outta here."

Try _again?_ Like hell - like _hell_ -

"Yes, Empress." Never in his life had he ever second thought the Empress' decisions, had he ever thought of her as anything other than the strong guiding hand of the Empire but as he managed to stagger out of her platform, her respiteblock and made his way through to the rooms he'd claimed as his own, he was thinking other things. How had he ever thought a monster like that could be pitied? He'd thought he'd been flushed for her - pale possibly - no, oh now he'd settle for never having to touch her again.

He was wrong about never touching her again.

An Empress without an Empire to rule was a ridiculous thing to see, after all. And he'd served under Her Imperious Condescension long enough to know that she only wanted to look ridiculous when she wanted to get someone off guard. She would never actually stand for _being_ ridiculous. So there would be an Empire, even if she had to repopulate it personally. 

It only took about five times before things actually 'caught', and Dualscar discovered there were whole new ways she could horrify him and his body could disgust him. Swelling, gravid, a new weight lying low in his pelvis and throwing off his balance. Hand to hand had never been his forte, but he'd been more graceful and sure of himself than this. He felt weak and vulnerable, swollen, wrong. He was _waddling_ , for fuck's sake. When he bothered to move at all. What he wanted to do and did as much as possible, was lie in the salt water pool in the captain's quarters that he'd taken over and let the water take the new, unfamiliar weight of his body. 

It had been one thing to pledge his life, his service to the Empire - he'd never thought he'd have to put his body into service like _this_. Who could have predicted anything like this?

He didn't know where the Condesce was taking them now, he didn't have the energy to care. It was all he could do to hold in his instinctive snarls and the way his hands shook when she came in to see how her 'praycious lil grubcage' was doing. Checking in on him, rubbing her hands over his stomach, the hump of it where the things she'd pumped into him grew bigger, his body shifting to accommodate in ways that left him breathless and aching. 

She spoke to the things she'd put inside him and not to him, unless it was to order him to eat. Telling them dreams of control and authority, of blood and war. Dualscar stared off into the distance over her shoulder and tried not to listen as her cold fingers cupped the swell, rings pressing painfully against stretched skin. Was this all they were gonna fuckin' do? Start the whole thing all over again? He...didn't know if he wanted to do that. He just didn't know if there was any other fuckin' way to go and he was so damn tired. Tired of this, tired of her, tired of everything. Tired in ways that went down to his bones.

The wavering contractions that pulled him from the pool were matched pulse by pulse by a need to hide, to go somewhere she couldn't find him. Wouldn't find him. Somewhere dark and quiet, somewhere safe. The ship wasn't big enough, there was nowhere to go. He found the best place he could - thank fuck for the fact that this had basically been a ship of seadweller officers - and barricaded the door, as far from her quarters as possible, sliding into the pool while the water was running to fill it up. Gills open and gasping for air, leaving the pants he'd managed to climb into the night before on the floor behind him like beach wrack. Not shipshape, not regulation but by Gl'bgolyb's _tentacles_ and the Imperial Emissary's festering _cloaca_ , this _hurt_. It wasn't the same as passing the ones that hadn't gone fertile, they'd slipped out easy, like nothing at all. These had had time to grow, as he fucking knew full well.

Screams escaped his mouth into the water, trying to muffle any murmur into something she wouldn't notice by staying submerged. And it felt right, being as deep under the surface as he could get. Safer. The - _eggs_ \- eggs, damn it, he could say what they were, they were trying to escape his body via his nook. How had trolls ever done this, how had they - _fuck!_ Dualscar clung to a recess in the bottom of the pool and flushed water through his gills, watching the ceiling through the water refractions and clenching the muscles he had left in his core. The first one finally came free, and he warbled relief at the immediate ease of having the ovoid globe passing through the entrance to his nook instead of being stuck behind it. Little spirals of violet wafted through the water in front of his eyes, dissipating, and Dualscar took a gulp of the brackish water through both sets of gills, set his fangs and settled down to get this fuckin' finished. On his own, the way he'd done basically anything ever. 

Shaking at the end of it, he felt more animal than troll. A mass of raw instinct, not knowing what to do and just going on his gut. It was all he had left. Gulping oxygen out of the water and on edge in a way he hadn't felt since he'd been a wiggler. And maybe not even then; his lusus had been one of the more care-taking sort and he was highblooded, he'd never gone cold and hungry the way he knew wigglers could, he'd had some protection even when he couldn't protect himself. A creature that cared about him, in its own skyhorse way. The eggs were clustered together between his feet, at the bottom of the pool. Faintly gelatinous, striped with vague swirls of violet and almost innocent seeming as if his nook wasn't still stretched to a gaping chasm between his thighs and he wasn't bleeding into the water like a gutted fish. And yet.

Still.

Dualscar surfaced, choking on the first gasp the way he always did when he'd been down for a while, shaking his head from side to side and letting his nictating membranes slide back from over his eyes. All he could hear was his own panting, the slow drip of water off his horns falling back into the pool. He couldn't hear _her_. Maybe there was some small mercies in the universe after all. He knew he only had so long. She'd been round to see how her new peons were growing every other night at least, circling back from what he was having to admit was madness to focus on her current obsession. He couldn't keep her out forever. Could he?

Fuck, he'd planned this badly. Crawling out of the pool and leaving the eggs where they were for the moment, he staggered his way into the respiteblock. Looking for something that he could use to stem the bleeding between his thighs, maybe even something for his pan-ache. Bless the cadet who'd had this room, the poor bastard. Because they'd left a medkit full of bandages and everything from suturing needles to medgel in their respiteblock. Maybe he hadn't done so badly after all...

Hissing as he packed his nook with medgel and debated over whether he could actually bear to take a needle to the biggest tear, he left the decision to one side for a moment and slapped an analgesic patch on his arm. The little sting as the beetle bit in, an acid rush before there was a glorious numbing spreading through his extremeties. Radiating inwards towards the dull ache of his nook. After a moment of deliberation, he put another one on the side of his hip, hoping it'd kill the agony between his thighs the faster. Still limping, muscles weak and strained, he carefully lowered himself to the lip of the pool and dangled his legs in the water. Looking down at the clutch of five eggs that he'd laid. Funny. It had felt like she'd pushed more into him _that_ time.

Just five, after all that work. Rubbing at his jaw, Dualscar lifted his eyes and stared at the ceiling, wanting to feel as numb in his head as he was starting to feel in aching parts of his body. Five eggs wasn't much of an Empire. Not even a village. 

Fuck, this wasn't going to be over any time soon.

His gloomy predictions were proved right, since as pleased as the Empress was to see the five eggs, she made it plain she would have been better pleased if there were more. And she was already making plans for the next lot. Dualscar made appropriate murmuring approving noises to all her plans as she outlined them, clawed hands sketching plans of conquest in the air as she spoke. Fangs glinting, eyes wide and bulbous behind her the pink glittering frames of her personal optical-enhancers. Thankfully now the eggs were _out_ of him, she seemed a lot less fucking focused on him and on them. He wondered how long they'd take to hatch.

When he'd had the jadeblood on his ship, he hadn't asked her about the brooding caverns, the Mother Grub, about wigglers. About what life had been like before she'd done the unthinkable, rescued a mutant grub and gone above ground in clear contradiction to what the Empire decreed her life should be. Even in slavery, she'd had a kind of impassable dignity, something that didn't let him ask questions and instead made him leave her be out of giving her orders for work. Not that that had bothered Mindfang a single fucking flying fig - in honesty, he was sure that Ahab's light had been a mercy all of its own, when he saw what his kismesis had done to the woman. 

Who could have seen this as an eventual fate? He'd always thought he'd go out under the claws and fangs of some lusus, or Mindfang would finally make good on her threat to have his throat. He'd thought he'd been fated to die when the Grand Highblood had opened that missive, but he'd skated through by the film on his fangs and walked back to his ship with his hide intact, if not his pride. Apparently destiny thought his pride needed more of a battering than it had already taken.

The eggs hatched faster than he'd thought. He hadn't wanted to take them out of the pool he'd laid them in, figuring that whatever was in them was both sides seadweller so maybe it was for the best. At least, he didn't think that it would hurt. He'd been dozing in the pool himself, trying to relax and letting his body have time to knit itself back together - he didn't bounce back as quickly as he had when he was younger, like when he'd almost lost his eye - when the first urgent peeping sounds caught his ear. Earfins spreading out curiously, he lowered himself to the bottom of the pool to watch the rest of them wiggle their way out of the eggs.

Then turn right around and eat them, little pincered mouths sucking the gelatinous stuff into ravenous maws. Segmented bodies twisting in the water, fluffy grublegs with their filaments flailing as the brood got themselves acquainted to the idea of moving under their own steam. Hard fanned tails jetting them through the water like little missiles. Almost without meaning to, he reached out to nudge a grub back from swimming straight at the wall, and the thing curled around his fingers. He expected it to bite him, but it just seemed to hang on and he was soon being investigated by all of them. Blunt little grubheads butting at him and legs scrabbling at him. He let out a warning hiss when some of those legs got too close to his god damn gills, and they floated off, blank eyes staring at him.

Snorting, Dualscar lifted himself up, pulling himself out of the pool. If he knew anything about grubs, he knew that they were hungry. For the moment at least, they had plenty of food. Calling grubloaf to the transportalizer took nothing but a moment, and he paid no heed to the wet puddled footprints he left behind him on his way there and back. Crumbling it up between his fingers, he dropped it to the water and the grubs soon figured out what it was for. Snatching it out of the water, and jetting back off into the depths before coming back for another piece floating on the top. At least they hadn't started eating each other.

Maybe it'd be some fucking version of the trials that they should go through, but he didn't know… Besides, the Empress would probably wind up thinking it was his fault if she lost one of the five from grub murder. Dualscar felt his earfins rise and flick uneasily just from the thought drifting over his head, before settling back into a more relaxed position. Needed to keep a handle on that shit, he'd gotten too fucking open lately. When he was alone. He hadn't really looked at the grubs in detail, just watching them idly and taking in the beginning orange nubs of soft horn shapes, a delicate tracery of colour showing in the underfan of their tails, something colourful on their dark grey bodies with their beady little black eyes. Violet, grey, violet...

 _Fuchsia_.

Oh shit. Dualscar leaned back to look over his shoulder like he could hear her coming already. Would she kill a grub? Ha, who the fuck was he kidding? Would she kill something that was going to grow up to be competition? He'd be cleaning fuchsia off the floor before he could say grubpaste, if she saw that one of the little beggars was the imperial colour. A little fucking princess. An Heiress. A replacement. Trailing his fingers in the water, he let one of the grubs swim underneath them and scratched lightly along the shell to get a chittering bubble of approval and a delighted wriggle, and then got up onto his feet. He had a few things to do.

cremaillereAquatic [CA] began trolling calamitousCondescension [CC] 

CA: The eggs hatched, Your Imperious Condescension.  
CA: One a them didn't make it.  
CC: so just four then?  
CC: not the result i was hoping for, ampora.  
CA: My most sincere apologies, Your Imperious Majesty.  
CC: i dunno how u can say just the right fin and still piss me off.  
CC: i guess four's a start at least. u'll just have to do betta next time, buoy.  
CA: Yes, Imperious Majesty.  
CC: i'll come around and sea them later, grubs are pretty borin.  
CC: all seadwellers?  
CA: Yes, ma'am. Same shade as me, far as I can tell.  
CC: eh. we'll sea how we go.  
CC: good fin they're all violet at least.  
CA: Yes, ma'am.  
CC: don't need that kinda fuckin complicraytion.  
CA: No, ma'am.  
CC: oh shut up. go feed the grubs or somefin.  
CC: don't net anymoray of them get knocked off or nofin pike sprat, i'm gonna be holding you raysponsible, ampora.

calamitousCondescension [CC]  has logged off!

Shaking with tension, Dualscar put down the palmhusk and sighed deeply. Maybe it wasn't true but he felt like if he'd tried to explain anything in further detail, she would have just figured out that he was lying and come in to fork the tyrian wriggler right through the head. He went back into the room with the pool to look at all five of the wrigglers, all of them seemingly happy enough to stay in the water. He'd spent so many sweeps culling the lusii of wigglers just like this, shooting them, dragging them to Gl'bgolyb and allowing the Emissary to feast. And now he was a fucking lusus. Not just a lusus, a Mother Grub as well.

Fuck, he wanted to go drink somewhere until he passed out and forgot about all of this. Everything. The Empress, the grubs, the way his body still ached as it healed itself back together. It was a good thing he was a fucking seadweller, even if he was old and getting on past his prime. Why was he alive? He still didn't know why.There wasn't a hint of pink in his violet, but here he was. The only fucking one. Had Gl'bgolyb remembered him, his sweeps of service feeding her and managed to spare him from Her Glub? He couldn't think of another reason and right now, honestly - he sort of wished She'd let him die except he didn't really. If he was alive, he was gonna stay a-fucking-live. And he was going to keep these grubs alive too, going against all kinds of traditions and his own personal history. Out of spite, if nothing else. He was used to spite. That at least, felt familiar. 

Somehow he managed to keep the little princess under wraps until the grubs go into their pupation stage, using sopor to dope her up and hiding her in a closet when Her Imperious Condescension swept in to check on her meagre lot of new subjects, fretting every fucking time that this time she'd wake up early. Or the Condesce would smell her out, just _know_ he was hiding something. Or he'd have misjudged how much sopor to use and she'd just slip away in her sleep. Grubs weren't really meant to be in sopor; he didn't think so anyway. There wasn't a lot of shit on grub rearing in the archives, much to his lack of surprise. Grub rearing and eggs and all of that was jadeblood business, and there'd never been a jadeblood who'd left the Caverns to be available to put that kind of thing in the collected works of the Imperial Forces. He hated not knowing things that he needed to know, but there wasn't a lot he could do about it now. Just flounder on, the way he'd been doing and hope.

Been a long time since he'd bothered to think about hope for anything. All he'd planned on doing was captaining his small destroyer, exploring where he was told, subjugating where he was ordered to and finally dying. A life in the service of the Empire. Decorated, mostly honourable. He'd put his hard yards in already on Alternia, when the Empire had still been mostly planet bound. It had _meant_ to be something like a retirement, the post he'd been given, although he knew better than most that the Empire never really finished using a troll. Sometimes it didn't end even when they were dead.

He knew all along that he couldn't hide the fuchsia blood hiding in his nest of pre-adolescent seadwellers forever. He hadn't named a one of them, hadn't known how to, but he'd grown fond of each and every one of them all the same. He hadn't wanted them. Didn't want to think too hard about how they'd come to be, but he was used to burying memories deep when he had to. For this, he really had to.

He _had_ hoped for longer though.

Still, the grubs had pupated safely and healthily, become wigglers and they'd started to babbletalk at him. One of 'em even had his lingering wigglerhood affliction of wavering his ws and vs, wobbling on them and doubling them up. They'd started to grow into their horns, a mishmash of Amporan waves and slender tips, curved Peixan scimaters, and a few little surprises here and there. Hooks and half-moons, and a sort of curl. The Empress had decided that it was about time to start trying for another clutch and the first time he'd come back bleeding and sore, they'd still all been in their cocoons, quiet and unknowing. The second and third the same, the fourth they'd been out. Confused by his reluctance to play with them the way he had before, before understanding that he was hurt.

He hadn't thought that trolls even knew how to be gentle. Maybe that it was something that they learned, when they had a moirail. When they understood that kind of thing. But the wigglers were soft and placating when they resolved the puzzle of his new behaviour, and obviously _concerned_ about his well being. Was it just selfish survival instincts? He was the one who brought the food. And protected them from the Empress, who all of them were terrified of. Smart. He hadn't been that smart until he'd been proper adult and really understood what the Empress was; or at least he thought he did. Now he knew that he'd known fucking shit about what she was like. _Really_ like, what she was. A fucking monster, as old and terrible as her lusus, just kinda pretending at wearing a troll skin.

Anyway.

He'd never seen the end of his loyalty and service to the Empire coming like this.

Barricading five shriek-crying wigglers in a closet behind him in a respiteblock on the Battleship Condescension. Blows from the Empress hammering at the door he'd thrown locked behind him, jamming a chair against the handle as he shoved the wigglers in front of him, away from her as she screamed in outrage, trying to reach the fuchsia blood he'd hidden from her for exactly this reason. Retreating deeper into the communal quarters he'd taken over as his own, as the nursery, he guessed. They'd needed more space as the wigglers were getting bigger, growing more clever and sinking tiny claws deeper into his pity every day. He'd had the forethought at least, to pack his armoury into the room and he could see the door splintering, cracking as her fist suddenly broke through with a sharp rending sound, brilliantly pink claws scraping at the air. 

As he pulled a hand beamer from its hiding place, turning it to check the charge, the door kept cracking and the hissing from behind it became clearer. Words starting to make sense as the Empress promised that when he'd hatched the clutch he was currently carrying, she was going to skin him. That first she was going to kill the fucking imposter he'd been raising to take her throne, her Empire (what throne? What Empire?) and she was going to make him watch as she took the wiggler apart. Make all of them watch.

Sliding the dial up, he squinted and took a breath. Taking aim and waiting for a clear headshot as he stood in front of the small shelter he'd forced the wigglers into. Everything in his head felt wonderfully clear for the first time since he'd heard the Glub. If he lived through this, he was going to find a nice quiet aquatic planet and pretend that the Alternian Empire had never existed. Maybe the wigglers could find a new, different way to grow.

Maybe all it'd take would be hope.

"Hey, Peixes! Here's my fucking resignation!"

As he exhaled, he squeezed the trigger and let loose a burst of white blinding light.


End file.
